DISCLAIMER: Ario Barzan is an artist, author, and composer. Some of their writing can be found on Brick By Brick, Kotaku, Kill Screen, and Heterotopias.

Every building is a medium, for it imparts information put there by someone or something. Ruins are a special sort of medium, in a state of structural stability and instability. As mediums, they are closer to our meaning for intermediate. Each ruin is somewhere between its completion and an unimaginable apocalypse. It is both historical fact and, as Robert Harbison writes, a “way of seeing.” Of course, we would have it no other way: the pleasure of the ruin is that it is incomplete. Fixing the thing would spoil the mood. Much like how the strategic obfuscation of anatomy in sexual play makes the body more exciting, the absences and erosions of ruins provoke our imagination, because they hide — perhaps forever — what once was there.

In ruins, we find a balancing act of our cyclic, existential agitation: the nearer we are to one thing, the more we may desire its opposites. These desires range from the mundane to the masochistic. Ultimately, the plateau produces ennui. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. It is rarely commented on how much the self-described rationalism of the European modernist architects was interrelated to a fatigue with neoclassicism and neogothicism and a romantic fascination with the United States’ factories, an apparent opposite to proper etiquette. Walter Gropius compared these factories to the “work of ancient Egyptians”, and Eric Mendelsohn wrote to his wife of his “silo dreams.” Nothing is done in a void of self-sufficient logic. We are always excluding when including, and always responding according to some measure of taste. 

To bring videogame developer FromSoftware onto the scene, we could observe that after Bloodborne, their visually densest creation ever, came Sekiro: clean, permeable, organized. If the former was like a seizure of the heart from the shock of morbid superabundance, the latter was an exhalation. Movement turned acrobatic and architecture was made secondary to caves, trees, stone columns, and rivers. Stepping further back: the impression Demon’s Souls made — at least outside of Japan — was in part due to its being seen as a lightning bolt cast upon an industry overrun by automation and helicopter-parent design. In 2009, one could still see the topic being split between core gamers and casual gamers. “Hand-holding” was the trendy putdown. Only three years earlier, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess released, its first few hours interpretable as a glorified tutorial. What is established will, in time, be the reason for change.

If we are to best comprehend Demon’s Souls, and the alterations present in developer Bluepoint Games’ remake — our last, brief point of interest –, though, we should reexplore what I have called director Hidetaka Miyazaki and company’s “sublime romance with pre-industrial European architecture.” The matter is as much one of cultural appropriations as it is of how we reimagine and theatricize art and nature. What is the twenty-four-years-long formal chain linking Super Mario Bros. and Demon’s Souls? The “medieval” setting. Mario’s journey through an uninhabitable wilderness strewn with blocky ruins towards a final castle is, on some conceptual level, not so different from the Slayer of Demons’ quest to scale the King’s Tower at the end of the Boletarian Palace. Of course, the apparent purposes, and resonances, of this aesthetic differ.

Let us look to the medieval reverie which has long enchanted most of all England, France, and the United States and, since the later twentieth-century, become a panmimetic germ. Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and Dragon Quest are a few of our most recent fulfillments of this reverie. Umberto Eco writes that our “return to the Middle Ages is a quest for roots”, for “the Middle Ages turned us into Western animals.” Today, we are mainly familiar with the medievalism of pretext and romanticism: stormy castles, ghosts, what Eco terms “cloak-and-dagger stuff.” The past is troped like an atmospheric stage. As pretext, it is functionally comparable to the term Soulslike, referring to a videogame with a set of mechanical specifications. It is a framework of pleasurable familiarity. The rest is up to interpretation.

A century-and-a-half ago, one’s acquaintance with the Middle Ages might have been its service in the name of national identities, when John Ruskin published The Seven Lamps of Architecture and Viollet-le-Duc embarked on a medieval-centric restorative campaign. Today, the stony fruits of these labors strike us less as moralistic attempts at reforming the industrial town and city and more as the vestiges of a fineness of craft and particularity of artistic mind. We are overwhelmed by the detail. It is nearly unthinkable to us that such buildings were ever the targets of criticisms which prompted Augustus Pugin to defend Gothic as “not a style but a principle.” Yet we also sense that the medievalist civic project failed. Complete as the Palace of Westminster might be, it is spiritually ruinous: emblematic of something bygone, its stringent exoskeletal markings echoing forms centuries older, and its current body in fact a post-fire rebuilding.

Push a bit further into the romantic way of seeing and we are met with the triumph of commercialism in remaking cultures into commodities. Canaletto’s painted Venetian views were items supplementing tourism, the Italian equivalent of kitsch. A hundred years after Canaletto’s death, this commoditization had exploded into Paris’ Exposition Universelle of 1867, where any didactic pretenses of historical education were outshone by the spectacle of what M. Christine Boyer calls the “pouring [of] a thinglike world into selective inventories.” Here, as in subsequent exhibits like the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, the emphasis was on the simulated experience of travel, largely assisted by reconstructions of private and public building-types. These exhibits — torn down once the events ended, being disposable, because industrial — were the precursors to our modern major amusement parks, sites of corporate enhancement. With the world turned into a picture show, one was groomed, through the directed act of voraciously looking, to become the modern consumer.

Every culture looks, but the manners, intents, and results of looking will vary. Camille Paglia writes that the “most effective weapon against the flux of nature is art”, and that “the west’s greatness arises from this delusional certitude.” It is the peculiar patriarchal lineage of the West, through its ways of seeing, to obsessively thing-make, to systematically and antagonistically objectify. This gaze is perhaps our most successful cultural export. When we look with a similar sort of voraciousness at the designs of the Saint Pancras railway station or Keble College’s chapel, we can have the daydreamy feeling that everything might be okay if all our facilities were so gilded and arranged. For all of the espousals of logic by those French theorists Laugier, J.-F. Blondel, or Durand, none challenged the axiomatic assumption that there was a direct causational relationship between architectural formalities and societal health. Our utopias are materialistic. Thus, most perversely, Disney World, a place where, James Howard Kunstler says, “our deepest psychological yearnings are reduced to a ritual of shopping for totems.”

Of course, no lineage is a monolith. The main stem has its tributaries. Still, the gravitational pull of that center may persist. During the eighteenth century in England, poetry, painting, gardening, topography, architecture, and the study of antiquity developed in tandem to form the art of Picturesque landscapes. It is true that this was set against the rigidity of French and Dutch layouts. John Dixon Hunt is right, however, to highlight the proximity between garden and theater design; that the influential poet Alexander Pope and his friends “thought of gardens as composed of ‘scenes’, and [that] his response to landscapes outside gardens was also to read them as stage scenery.” What we find at the Stourhead or Stowe estates is what John Summerson terms “sophisticated wildness” — a manageable decomposition, nature and artifice graphically fused. It is the mediation of theater. Irregularities are craved as diversified evokers of sentiments.

Despite the attention paid to landscaping traditions, there is an absence of scholarly literature devoted to the grotto. Coarse yet refined, natural yet sculpted, ruinous yet composed, the grotto has blended dualities like no other western architectural topos. Pope himself, who valued the mental effects of gloom, had one at his villa in Twickenham. The grotto never resolves the ambiguity of whether it is human design emerging from nature or nature on the verge of reclaiming its birthright. It is sexually chthonic, a circumscribed encounter with the deep, mossy, wet groin of the Earth. Its oldest extant sources in the Mediterranean point to the prehistoric practice of what Naomi Miller calls “speleolatry, or cave worship, which recognizes that ‘together with the mountain, or the river, with which it is associated, the cave belongs to a higher order of beings — ‘elementals’…nature’s wonders hidden in strange places.'”

We cannot determine the grotto’s precise religious significance in Roman culture, but we can still perceive a theatrical trajectory, from nymphaea to frons scaenae. When the grotto reappears during the European Renaissance, the “overwhelming impression”, continues Miller, “is that of a ruin resurrected; it is the idea of antiquity incarnate.” Boyer writes similarly of the Romantic ideal of Greek architecture: “Antiquity became an escape into adventure, into the exotic other, into the marvelous. It offered the compensation of ‘once-upon-a-time’ to mollify the flat and repetitive present.” It is not long before grottoes are paired with coordinated waterworks, and the attestations of those that they impressed are not so unlike Joseph Furttenbacher the Elder’s comments about Italian intermezzi, wherein “the spectator is so overcome with wonders that he scarcely knows whether he is in the world or out of it.” Two-hundred years later, these novelties had worn thin. Technologies and tastes change. Stimulation must be found elsewhere.

If the through line of this compressed historical narrative is theater and its intersection with notions of ruins and antiquity, we could reenter post-modernity along the track of the environmental disaster cinematic genre — a genre whose dramas did not end with its heyday but were assumed by the now-ubiquitous superhero genre, each of its franchises obsessed with both averting an end of the world and reveling in those visions. Or we could reexamine the theme park, especially now that Nintendo has joined the ring with its upcoming Super Nintendo World, where a pretentious fidelity of fiction (crenellated castles included) is in service to brand visibility and commerce as final fact. Let us rather return to the videogame industry, ripe with its own significant strain of medievalism: The Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, The Witcher, Castlevania, Diablo, the aforementioned Dragon Quest — and, yes, the Souls series.

It has been the distinction of videogame architecture to often function “as the vehicle of a mood”, as Fritz Neumeyer writes of Friedrich Gilly’s perception of the Gothic, and an obstacle to be strove against. The drama of spatial construction is one wherein we vicariously act to overcome the absolutism of an authorial, yet admirable, design. Speculations over psychological origins aside, it is clear that there is a human desire to be faced by a problematic which involves our agency, a hierarchy, and the potential for victorious resolution. On a very basic level, this is what sports are: devised conflict. Play is as much meaning-making as it is pretending control. Perhaps we will desire that conflict all the more as technology escalates its attempts to defeat inconveniences, just as we may even more fervently desire the rustic, authoritatively centralized medieval fantasy as a contrast to a seemingly automated and politically diffuse here and now.

At a time when de-colonial criticism has acquired a notable level of visibility within academia, one might be tempted to see our age’s medievalism as really just propaganda: a monstrous imperialist setting-down like the Victoria Terminus in Mumbai or Lutyens’ Delhi in New Delhi. This would be a strictly partial evaluation, for architectural meaning is not fixed. Charles Jencks discerns that “custom and usage will first set [it] in one semantic space and then transform [it] in another.” This is to our benefit. Were meaning fixed, there would be a merciless limit on any building’s life expectancy, and we would be all the more enslaved by the consumerist cycle. It is spatial imposition which unites architecture and colonization, a practice as old as human histories. For myself, the germ’s uncanny prosperity prompts poetic considerations: that, perhaps it is something like an epochal daemon, a worm of an idea, a psychic contagion, immune to even the sharpest criticism. We may use it fancifully, politically, however. But perhaps it will only recede when its mythical realities can no longer find residence among social realities.

These possessing and possessed attributes, indeed, mark FromSoftware’s Souls titles and especially Bloodborne, and maybe Hidetaka Miyazaki’s own imaginative development as well. As I wrote elsewhere of Demon’s Souls, “Each area could be interpreted as a special formal expression of the apocalyptic insanity spoiling the land. […] …the Tower of Latria’s prison […] mired itself in a repetitive power-structure tied to the domineering mind of a mad king; and the excavation site of Stonefang Tunnel […] had a mood of abandoned industry, or industry that had overridden a productive purpose and become its own grim end.” The story of Miyazaki going to libraries as a child, half-comprehendingly absorbing English works of fantasy and horror, and plugging up the gaps with his own ideas, has become a sort of communal myth. There is indeed an element of the exotic here; but that is what medievalism has ever been. The yet-unacknowledged joke and endless irritant of historians is that the “Middle Ages” covers a span of approximately a thousand years and a variety of cultures and peoples. To view it as a coherent psycho-temporal unit is folly. Of course, this has stopped nobody from doing so.

Demon’s Souls‘ medievalism, architecturally manifested, is sinisterly simple-minded: brutal and brutalized, and still the apotheosis of Miyazaki’s belief that “the world is generally a wasteland that is not kind to us.” King’s Field IV, FromSoftware’s last entry in that series, is a closer relative here than Dark Souls. The Boletarian Castle is like England’s Dover Castle magnified to nightmarish proportions. We will see banners, taut statues atop plinths, and stark blind arches here and there, but nearly every apparent embellishment is in truth a wartime invention or constructive solution. Aesthetics arise from compositional severities: big blunt forms sited into, on top of, and under one another, fenestration the plain rhythmic puncturing of stonework. We are far from the make-believe of Wollaton Hall or Fonthill Abbey, or the cathedral-gone-wrong compromises of the Royal Courts of Justice. Almost wherever we look, architecture is a sort of tomb-like carcass, slowly degrading yet uncompromising. When it is bedecked, as with Latria’s church, we notice this all the more keenly, as if its facade’s stained glass windows are akin to the bejeweled eye sockets of Rome’s catacomb saints.

Against expectations, what we are confronted by is a strange sort of realism. It is all at once, to use several more of Eco’s categories, medievalism as pretext, Romanticism, philosophia perennis, a barbaric age, and the expectation of the Millennium. Humanism is a distant memory. There is no good king or queen, nor any grandfatherly magician, who will save the people. God has gone into hiding. Our donning of armor, its own architecture, is not so much the signaling of chivalry as it is the materializing of fearful hostility towards nature. The game’s Japanese cover art, depicting a knight of infinite resignation (perhaps Ostrava of Boletaria) slumped against a wall, forecasts this bleakness. Not even the Nexus, our subliminal and posthumous home base, is free of savagery. Architecture does not comfort us, so we must cope with it. Like a mountain, that harsh-bodied formation of prolonged violence, it is just there. Its very naked monumentality, fixed amongst the windy howls and dusty whorls of a wasteland whose sustenances are hard kept, provokes the question of how much longer it will be around.

The stories and settings for Demon’s Souls, the Dark Souls trilogy, Bloodborne, and Sekiro have sometimes been called nihilistic or pessimistic. I disagree. Nihilism is pitiful self-denial rationalized to allow its being entertained in a philosophy seminar. It has little to say. Rather, Miyazaki and company are working within a mythological capacity. That morbidity would be prominent is no surprise given meaning-making’s relationship to mortality. One can hardly think, for example, of a more perfect title for Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century revision of the King Arthur legend than what publisher William Caxton gave it: Le Morte d’Arthur. The most obvious and uncomfortable certainty uniting humanity is that we are all dying together. This is that strange sort of realism. Demon’s Souls harnesses the negative pain of Edmund Burke to suggest and illustrate the operations of power and violence, the vitality of myth, and death’s ever-presence among life. Here, the exoticism of medievialism is the exoticism of demise: so near yet so far, the dual provocation of an entertained fascination and upsetting repulsion.

What makes Bluepoint Games’ remake disappointing is its propagation of an industry’s determinist bias which views artistry as linearly technological and encourages this viewpoint in its audiences. Expressive idiosyncrasies are imposed upon in the name of improvement and demonstrating the might of a shiny new videogame console. Those fortified towers standing guard about the Boletarian Palace have been given hats, recalling Viollet-le-duc’s inaccurate restorations to the Cité de Carcassonne. Passages prior to the Vanguard demon are packed with moldings and jamb shafts. Latria has been retrofitted with spangles, barbs, and elaborate perpendicular work to resemble the more melodramatically nefarious depictions of Minas Morgul. Oddest of all is that the original romanesque architectural theme is largely replaced by a kind of free-form Gothic, as if Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne were representative of a rough stylistic standard. It is now only in Stonefang Tunnel’s first portion where we can sense Piranesi’s dungeons; and elsewhere, any of that arresting proximity to what Emil Kaufmann describes as the “austerity of [Boullée’s] stereometric forms” has been banished.

Demon’s Souls is a console exclusive, and so is Bloodborne. This is due in both cases to Sony Computer Entertainment’s ownership of publishing rights. To play the former, you need a PlayStation 3, whose production stopped and whose components do not get better with age; the latter, a PlayStation 4. Nabbing two birds with one stone isn’t feasible either, since the PS4 is not backwards compatible. One wonders if there has ever been a medium more vulnerable to its own rapid material advances and corporate strangeholding. For Demon’s Souls, its remake (also an exclusive) interestingly complicates the issue. Now, it is not just a question of accessibility but also of experiencing what we might call authenticity. Self-described cinephiles would be only too familiar with this, given the history of edited rereleases of films. It is predictable that the original Demon’s Souls will come to be specially revalued because of what it is set against. Situated thusly, its whole body becomes speculative ruin. That its servers, which facilitated online multiplayer, were closed in 2018 could add an extra note of poignancy for some.

Usually, the question of whether or not a rainbow exists if no one is there to see it is a cute comment on position and sight. Often left unsaid is that the positionality of the subject-object relationship is also contingent upon the emotional and symbolic content of subjectivity; that is, the intermediation of our psychic experience defines reality, moment to moment. This is why we are human beings, and why, when we project onto a ruin, we intervene and make it something else. We tend to have difficulty with existence’s flux, though. It’s been wondered if Pugin died because he at last could no longer bear the divide between his reformational aspirations and society as it was. His breakdown and confinement suggest a schizophrenic suffering. Fixations can overtake us. “My thoughts are not my self”, Carl Jung wrote, “but exactly like the things of the world, alive and dead. […] Thoughts are natural events that you do not possess, and whose meaning you only imperfectly recognize.” Theater is, in part, an attempt to capture these thoughts, nostalgia our bittersweet acknowledgment of impermanence.

In Henry Fuseli’s variously translated chalk and wash drawing, The Artist’s Despair Before the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins, a figure sits with a hand to their head and the other on a giant foot dislocated from the Colossus of Constantine. It is a perfect model of, as Harbison puts it, “ruin as a psychic state.” He continues: “When a childhood scene is cleared to make way for something else or perhaps nothing else, one’s first thought is not of those who lived there last, one’s successors, but of one’s old sensations which are now a book abruptly closed.” I hold to the criticisms I’ve made of Bluepoint Games’ remake; though I can recognize a part of myself wishing to blame it for further obstructing not an object but a personal, first-time adventure. The irretrievability of this first time is the fault of nothing besides flux. There must be people for whom Demon’s Souls itself was taken for an inceptive betrayal of what they enjoyed about FromSoftware’s output prior. All our homes and haunts will one day be razed, supplanted by other realities, and our memories will be subjected to voids of their own. All we can do then is try and pick up the pieces — or simply look from a point of unreckoned distance.

like this article? please consider supporting us on Patreon or following us on Twitter!